Lethal Intent

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Lethal Intent Page 6

by Sue Russell


  Aileen’s considerable, if raw, artistic talent was largely overlooked at school as it was at home, bringing her little reinforcement. But her ‘antisocial behaviour’, low grades and very poor relationships with classmates and teachers, did not go unnoticed at Smith Junior High. At fourteen, she was prescribed a mild tranquilliser that failed to improve her behaviour. She’d also run away from home. Indeed, a report by diagnostician Carolyn Marcy, completed in April 1970, ended on an emphatic warning note.

  Aileen heartily disliked school and had always had problems there. Her poor hearing and slight vision impairment were noted by staff early on. She was prescribed glasses, which out of vanity she refused to wear. Her hearing difficulties had been noted as far back as kindergarten, but with the rider that they would not handicap her comprehension in the classroom. By the age of eight, the right ear was identified as having greater hearing loss, and it was suggested that she be properly tested, and also be seated near the front of the classroom with her left ear towards the rest of the class. She was still considered unhandicapped in classroom.

  Curiously, while her family doctor’s later report noted an ear infection and earache at age ten, it failed to register her as ‘hard of hearing’. An oversight? Or had Britta Wuornos, who believed Aileen’s sole problem was that she was temperamental and disliked taking direction, deliberately omitted to tell the doctor about the school diagnosis? It seems the most likely explanation since that same year a further school report concluded: ‘There are many indications that Aileen has a hearing problem. However, her mother is very defensive about this and says Aileen simply does not pay attention. She refuses to permit a professional evaluation.’

  The same report observed that Aileen ‘loses interest quickly and can easily become a leader in discipline problems.’

  Other tests found her to have a low verbal IQ (80) and an average performance IQ (106): ‘Everyday judgement based upon experience tested average. Motivation for assimilation of facts, numerical concepts, word knowledge and social awareness were far below average.’

  Tests also yielded the nebulous if prophetic conclusion that Aileen was not ‘comfortable’ in the female role.

  The report also commented: ‘A well developed super ego results in guilt feelings, as behaviour is seen affecting the emotional well-being of those close to her. The outstanding feature was a remarkable concern for strong family ties.’ And noted that ‘Culturally nonconforming behaviour is of great concern to Aileen. Moral values, concern for her family’s hurt, contribute to her guilt feelings.’

  While Barry Wuornos had already made a layman’s observation of Aileen as being ‘hard-headed’ and ‘without conscience’, here was a test result from a counsellor seeing something altogether different. Guilt, concern for others and for the rules of society.

  Would that she had been right.

  Marcy’s report ended with the prophetically urgent words: ‘It is vital for this girl’s welfare that she receive counselling immediately. ’

  The warning was not heeded. Aileen never did receive any counselling, either as an in-patient or out-patient. With each year that passed, the broad, open smile of an innocent little girl gradually slipped from her face.

  5

  Both Aileen Britta Moilanen’s and Lauri Jacob Wuornos’s parents were born in Finland. As first generation immigrants, like many of their countryfolk they settled in Michigan’s upper peninsula. Britta was one of thirteen children raised by a mother who went blind in middle age. Britta’s sister Alma, the youngest, married Ben Kuopus, himself the oldest of fourteen. It was one of many unions between sprawling clans, and Aileen had no shortage of kinfolk.

  Lauri and Britta moved to the Rochester area in 1936. When Aileen and Keith were small, Lauri was transferred from Chrysler in Michigan to the Firestone Tire factory in Akron, Ohio. Lauri rented out his house on Cadmus to Alma and Ben, but a year later he was laid off and he and his family returned to Troy. Alma, Ben, and their children, Elaine, Kathy, and Larry, then moved across the street, where they stayed for the next twelve years.

  Bill, the eldest Wuornos brother, was found dead by the tracks one day, thought to have been hit by a train. Brother Eno was next oldest, then Lauri, then their sister Gertrude. Eno and his wife, Pat Ullman, lived a couple of blocks away, and there were family poker games at Cadmus. Lauri had one rule for his own debts but another for others’, and when he wouldn’t let Eno owe him, Eno reached right across the table and punched him in the nose. The short, stocky ex-Marine was the only person to stand up to Lauri.

  Later, there was a serious rift between Aileen’s grandparents and Eno and Pat. Eno died in the late sixties and Pat later lived with another man, but that estranged branch of the family remained shrouded in mystery for the younger generation. Lauri told the kids to stay away from Pat but never explained why. They thought she must be nutty and suppressed their urge to knock on the door and find out.

  Eventually, Lauri’s drinking put a strain on his relationship with his sister-in-law, Alma. Lauri was never parted from a bottle of wine, keeping one at home, one in his car, and one in a drawer at work, and when Barry left home, Alma believed Lauri’s alcoholism contributed. ‘Lauri was dominant, and Barry was a nice kid, didn’t want to fight.’

  Britta, by contrast, was quiet and introverted, with a sweet disposition. ‘Almost a saint,’ in Barry’s eyes. Sturdily built, she wore her hair in a bun and dressed in pretty, long skirts, giving her a look of the old country. She was a familiar if distant figure to neighbours, kneeling outside, tending her flowerbeds. Aileen idolised and idealised her, viewing her as adorable, with a perfect figure. Britta painted, wrote poetry, played the accordion, and babysat part-time, and took Aileen and Keith on field trips in the backyard to see how insects live at night.

  Despite her solid appearance, Britta was frail, if not sickly—and a terribly nervous driver. When the car skidded, it was Lori who had to calm her mother.

  Britta and John Majestic’s mother, Opal, were pals. Sociable Opal, perhaps Britta’s only confidante, was famous for her home-baked cookies and doughnuts; but she also liked to drink. They used to chat while hanging their washing out on the line. The only time Lori saw her mother shed tears was when Opal died.

  Home saunas were commonplace items among the Finnish community. Lauri’s, housed in the garage on Cadmus, was in the ethnic tradition, created from a metal barrel with the top cut out, and with a wood-burning, chimneyless stove in the bottom. Rocks were placed over the stove. Water was then poured in to create the steam. The barrel sat against one wall, opposite two benches, one high and one low. Naked or wrapped in a towel, they sat there, inhaling the hot steam and waiting for the purifying and cleansing sweat to break out, glistening on their skins. The ritual was a part of Wuornos family life. Yet when Lori’s high school screened its educational film on the facts of life to the latest body of students to reach adolescence, and parents were required to sign a letter of consent, to Lori’s excruciating embarrassment, Lauri refused. She was forced to sit alone out in the hallway, her view into the classroom blocked by black paper that was put up specially to mask the windows for the Wuornos child.

  There seemed a grotesque kind of paradoxical inconsistency in the behaviour of a man who forbade his daughter to watch sex education films, yet thought nothing of locking three naked adolescents together in the sauna. Sexual repression contrasted with a blatant disregard for the presence of adolescent urges.

  ‘Don’t spread your legs until you are married,’ Lauri often chided Lori, but he was otherwise vehemently opposed to any mention of sex and didn’t allow her to date. Lori dutifully remained a virgin until she was eighteen. She assumed her parents didn’t want her to screw up her life like Diane.

  Lauri explained the Finnish rituals, bragging that as a child, after a session in the sauna, he’d run to the end of the docks, chop a hole in the ice and jump in. Commanded by Lauri, John and Barry would ‘stoke that baby up till it got red hot’, then whip themselves
with the traditional whisks of birch twigs. In winter, they sometimes put a big pile of snow in the garage and would scurry from the sauna and fling themselves into it, naked as the day they were born. Sometimes Lauri joined in, pouring a bucket of ice water over each of them and, warmed by the glow of alcohol into something approaching bonhomie, passed round his bottle of wine.

  As he had done with Diane and Barry before them, Lauri sometimes closeted Aileen, Lori and Keith in the sauna as a punishment.

  ‘Keith, don’t you go in the sauna without clothes?’ Jerry Moss asked him, riddled with curiosity about this mysterious foreign ritual.

  ‘Yeah. We didn’t even have a towel.’

  ‘What’d you do in there?’

  ‘We didn’t do nothin’. Waited for my dad to let us out.’

  Still, everybody thought it a strange scenario. Imagine—locking up three stark-naked kids together? And Lauri Wuornos talked up such a good story about sexual purity.

  Titillated by the idea, and convinced they’d see more than just nudity, Jerry and a friend sneaked around a couple of times in an abortive effort to peak inside for a glimpse of Aileen and Keith. They’d heard there was a peephole from the attic above, but when they tried to creep up there, Lauri came out and they had to make a run for it.

  Lori Grody believes her father could not have sexually abused Aileen in the house without her knowing. Viewing it from the street, to the left lay two bedrooms: the front one Aileen and Lori’s, the rear one occupied by Keith and, when he was still living there, Barry. Lauri had added a spacious room on to the centre back of the house, where he and Britta slept on a foldout couch.

  There was an attic space above Lori and Aileen’s bedroom, but the floorboards creaked. By Lori’s account it was small, one step up from a crawl space, yet Aileen detailed the room as having contained a bed, a desk and bookshelves, and Diane remembered staying up there.

  If Aileen was sexually abused in the house, it would certainly have been possible for Lori not to have known, or, if she was aware of it, for her to have blocked out her memories. It would definitely be consistent with the minimal communication in the family for Aileen to have kept it to herself.

  Specifically, Aileen told only one story of highly inappropriate behaviour by her grandfather when she was in her early teens. In front of Britta, Lauri grabbed Aileen and kissed her on the mouth, forcing his tongue down towards her throat. Retelling this, Aileen laughed: she found the whole thing not so much abhorrent as very funny.

  It might have been the tip of the iceberg; the sole, readily accessible memory of full-blown abuse. Or it might have been a bizarre incident born of a drunken binge. There would be other clues.

  6

  Aileen Wuornos never came face-to-face with her biological father, Leo Arthur Pittman, to whom she owed a large part of her genetic heritage. Leo’s marriage to Diane was over before Aileen took her first breath in this world. He didn’t even know she was pregnant when he left.

  Yet the lives of these genetically linked strangers ran uncannily similar paths. Just like Aileen, Leo before her was abandoned by his natural parents, Lorraine Pittman Briggs and her husband Arthur. When he was five months old, they left him and his two sisters alone in an apartment overnight. Also like Aileen, Leo was rescued and raised by his grandparents. Ida and Leo Herbert Pittman adopted him along with Nancy, the younger of his sisters. His other sister, Patsy, was adopted by another family.

  Leo’s grandparents, who ran the local garbage dump and owned a pleasant house across the street from it, doted on him. His grandfather died of throat cancer when Leo was in his early teens, but Leo remained devoted to his grandmother, Ida. Almost worshipful of her. She spoiled him terribly, baking him his favourite cookies and constantly indulging his whims. She also overlooked his chronic truancy and pathetic academic performance in school, not to mention his repeated discipline problems.

  As a kind of sinister mark of his affection, Leo (a bed wetter until he was thirteen) also hit her and abused her. Significantly, she turned a blind eye to his behaviour, as she and her late husband had always done, still over-compensating for his rough start in life. In that household, young Leo definitely called the shots.

  The red-haired, freckle-faced boy managed to check his rotten temper most of the time at Troy High, but it manifested itself at home. If he didn’t get his way with Grandma, he’d react violently, punching the refrigerator or kicking down a door:

  ‘His grandma was the sweetest person in the world and Leo was “it” for her, but he treated her like a dog,’ recalls Larry Larson, who met him at fifteen. ‘I know he struck her when he’d get mad. Still, that was her Leo.’

  Leo never talked about his real parents and Larry rapidly learned it was a touchy subject, best avoided. Leo, Larry, and another friend, Fritz Sturms, whiled away their spare time fishing or swimming in the same gravel pits that a generation later would so attract Aileen. Leo at 5 foot 8 inches was stocky, solidly built, athletic and a good, strong swimmer. He and Larry walked in the woods that then fringed the water, shooting rabbits or rats with a .22 rifle (Leo was ‘a hell of a shot’, one friend recalls) and generally looking for mischief. Their idea of a laugh was to tie a couple of cats’ tails together and throw the animals over a clothes line to see feline war break out.

  ‘We weren’t angels,’ Larry reflects. ‘It’s not that Leo was a bad guy and I was a good guy. I was just as rotten.’

  Before he knew Leo, Larry was already a close friend and neighbour of Diane’s and of Marge Moss (Jerry’s older sister). The trio were in the same grade and rode the school bus together.

  Diane was quiet, sweet and friendly. But Larry, a jokester by nature and certainly not given to deep reflection at that age, nevertheless picked up the strong impression that there was something strange about her family. The neighbourhood kids perceived Lauri Wuornos as some kind of a big-shot executive because he wore a suit to his job at Beaver Tool and Dye and because he had a sauna attached to the house. Larry’s own dad was a mechanic and Marge’s a carpenter, so Lauri was seen as something a step up. Furthering that impression, the aloof Wuornoses didn’t frequent Connie’s Bar like the rest of the locals. Everyone respected Lauri Wuornos. No one ever questioned him.

  Yet there was something odd about the Wuornoses. Larry and Marge’s families welcomed other kids, but not Diane’s. On Sundays, Lauri allowed Diane to ride the bus to the cinema in Rochester with Marge, but Diane wasn’t allowed to go to a basketball game, even with a group. Lauri kept her on a tight rein, but it was more than that. A cloud of secrecy hung over Diane’s family and she, too, was secretive and somehow troubled.

  Once, before Leo came into her life, Diane asked Larry to hide her from her folks and he stowed her away in his family’s attic for a couple of days, sneaking her down into the kitchen for food when his parents went out to work.

  ‘Why did you leave?’ Larry asked. Diane just shook her head. Larry found his unofficial house guest attractive and tried making advances, but Diane turned him down.

  Years later, Larry’s second wife, JoAnn, heard about Diane’s secret stay—from his parents. They’d known all along but decided not to intervene, despite realising that Diane’s parents might be worried about her whereabouts. Intuitively, they knew that if Diane was hiding out, she had a good reason.

  Larry Larson liked Leo Pittman and hung out with him a good deal, but was mystified as to why Diane, petite, dark-eyed and pretty like her mother, took up with him. Yet Diane’s attraction to the moody, explosive Leo was in many ways so predictable. She’d been hoping for a white knight, and he cut an appealing, wildly rebellious figure on his motorcycle, representing a freedom she could only have dreamed of. They soon became inseparable and were often seen holding hands, heading for the privacy of the woods. Just as Aileen would do later on her secret missions, Diane sneaked out of her bedroom window to meet Leo. Larry didn’t doubt that Leo loved Diane: ‘He’d probably go to the end of the earth for her—as long as she did wh
at he said.’

  When Lauri was safely out of the way, Diane and Leo, Larry and Marge (who were by then dating), used the sauna, too. The girls were discreetly wrapped in towels and it was far from an orgy atmosphere, yet the environment was conducive to the gratification of strong teenage impulses that wouldn’t be quieted. In those days, no one bothered with condoms or thought too much of the consequences.

  By Lauri’s rulebook, Diane was forbidden to date. Something that so angered Leo that he once put sugar in Lauri’s gas tank. Diane, who was regularly grounded, would cry on the phone to Marge, saying that she had to get out. When Fritz, a classmate, innocuously asked to come around to study with her, Lauri wouldn’t even allow that. He didn’t want Diane hanging around with boys and watched her like a hawk.

  Predictably, Lauri vehemently disapproved of Diane’s liaison with the reckless and unsavoury Leo Pittman. No father would have been thrilled with the match. Leo was generally regarded as a bit of a hood. He even kept guns in the back of the car. (Another foreshadowing of Aileen’s behaviour.) Yet Larry Larson had a curious encounter with Lauri as a result.

  Larry had really never even seen Lauri up close before but out of the blue, Diane’s dad extended him an extraordinary offer, saying he would pay his way through trade school. The fee, around $300, was a lot of money back in the late fifties, and Larry was mystified. Only with hindsight would he notice what eluded him then: Lauri had accompanied the offer with a barrage of questions about Leo, and Leo’s relationship with Diane. Lauri was trying to buy inside information about his daughter and her beau.

  With all the precautions Lauri took, he was beside himself when Diane defied him and eloped with Leo, marrying him on 3 June 1954. Permission for the underage couple was given by Leo’s grandmother. Diane was fourteen and Leo seventeen, but they lied about their ages, both claiming to be eighteen. The Wuornoses were furious, feeling Diane had brought disgrace to the family.

 

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